Unified Theory's Gravitation as Interaction via Sharmon Medium

Scientific Paper
Title	Unified Theory's Gravitation as Interaction via Sharmon Medium
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Rati Ram Sharma
Keywords	Gravity, Gravitation, Sharmon Medium, General Relativity, Bending of light under gravity, Gravity waves
Published	2009
No. of pages	14

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Abstract

Newton published the law of universal gravitation F_g = G (m₁m₂)/r² in 1687 after observing the fall of the legendary apple in 1665 but did not give its physical mechanism. De Duillier in 1690 , Le Sage in 1748 and Paul Schroeder in 2010 have proposed mechanical explanations but the nature and origin of their gravity-mediators remain unclear. Einstein's General Relativity in 1916 linked the gravitational field with the curvature of, and gravity waves with the ripples in, the mathematical 4-dimensional spacetime continuum bereft of physical existence. In Unified Theory mass bodies are composed by electrons, protons & neutrons each having 10^20-23 cosmino-sharmon constituents thereby allowing for compositional fluctuations via emission and absorption of small cosmino-sharmon units. The 1.6x10^-33 cm diameter sharmons of the sharmon medium pass through inter-atomic spaces and between orbital electrons to enter a mass-body for intimate interactive exchange of 0-spin sharmon composed mass-energy units dE to generate attractive force dE/dx between gregarious sharmons of test mass-body and ambient sharmon medium and through it with all other mass-bodies. Action-at-a-distance is thus ruled out.The gravitational mass of the elementary cosminos (positrino & negatrino) composing the mass bodies and sharmons of the sharmon medium thus serve as both the cause and mediator of the gravitostatic force and field operating in the sharmon medium. The gravitational wave energy comprising 0-spin sharmons is emitted, absorbed and propagated as a Wave-Quantum UNIT in the sharmon medium via contiguous mechanism through 2-spin gravitons, which do not move from their mean positions. Since 0-spin sharmons compose all forms of neutral mass and energy the identity of gravitational and inertial masses follows naturally. General-relativity's equation for bending of light under gravity is re-deduced from sharmon medium without bending of the spacetime.

Overview

Rati Ram Sharma's paper is a chapter-length statement of the gravitational half of his Unified Theory, a system he has developed since a 1990 book and which posits a single, all-pervading, physically real medium — the sharmon medium — as the "basic substance" out of which every form of mass and energy is composed. The paper's specific task is to supply what Sharma says Newton never gave and Einstein replaced with mathematics: a physical mechanism for gravitational attraction. He surveys and rejects the alternatives — Fatio de Duillier's and Le Sage's impacting corpuscles and Paul Schroeder's "paeps" beams, all of which he faults because "the nature and origin of the assumed ultra-mundane particles remained unclear" — and then rejects general relativity outright on the ground that its four-dimensional spacetime continuum has no physical existence.

The break with the mainstream account is total rather than partial. Sharma denies that spacetime is a substance, denies that any particle is massless (so the photon, graviton, neutrinos and quarks all carry finite mass and size, and the Higgs boson "does not exist"), denies that relativistic mass diverges at c, denies that gravitational waves are detectable by present instruments, and replaces the equivalence principle with an identity of gravitational and inertial mass that he says follows automatically from common composition. What he offers in its place is a granular, mechanical ontology: two indivisible elementary particles called cosminos (a positive positrino and a negative negatrino), their bound pair the sharmon, and a kinetic gas of sharmons filling all space. Gravitation is then a real exchange of sharmon-composed mass–energy units ΔE between a body and the surrounding medium, generating an attractive force ΔE/Δx — so that, as he emphasises, "action-at-a-distance is thus ruled out".

The argument

Why spacetime is not real, and why a medium is

Sharma's negative case is that space and time "are not physical substantive entities but mere abstract concepts", evolving from the human perception of successive positions ("there, here, there") and successive moments ("then, now, then"), with the arrow of time following from the irreversibility of the processes that generate the perception. Two abstractions, he argues, cannot fuse into a tangible continuum. He adds a physical objection: any real multidimensional continuum would retard the motion of bodies and of light, and no such retardation has ever been observed; and a static, non-composite spacetime could not undulate to carry a transverse wave.

His positive case for a medium assembles familiar dissident evidence. The Casimir force, and in particular Sparnaay's 1958 finding that a residual attraction persists as the temperature approaches absolute zero, shows the vacuum "is not completely empty but has some real physical medium that cannot be removed by any means". Fields need a carrier; Maxwell's displacement current needs a physical substrate; zero-point energy needs physical oscillators. He cites James DeMeo's review of ether-drift experiments and quotes Dayton Miller's 1928 verdict that "after considering all the possible sources of error, there always remained a positive effect". Finally, he argues from the interconvertibility of mass and energy that E = mc² is unintelligible unless both are composed of one substance — for otherwise they "could not inter-convert". Sharma insists throughout that the sharmon medium is "NOT an assumption or a postulate but a necessary natural deduction".

Cosminos, sharmons, and the numbers attached to them

The theory is unusually specific. A cosmino has diameter equal to the Planck length, 1.6156×10⁻³³ cm, mass 2.596×10⁻⁴⁸ g, charge ±1.3729×10⁻³⁰ esu and spin ±½. A positrino and a negatrino bind into a neutral sharmon of mass 5.192×10⁻⁴⁸ g; opposed half-spins give the scalar 0-spin sharmon, co-directional half-spins the 1-spin vector sharmon, and the two interconvert. The constituents do not annihilate, because being non-composite they have nothing to decompose into. Because the cosminos both spin and vibrate along a common axis, the sharmon carries electric and orthogonal magnetic dipole moments — the source, in this scheme, of all electromagnetic phenomena.

The medium itself is characterised as a kinetic gas: about 10¹⁵ sharmons per cm³, mean density 5.192×10⁻³³ g/cm³ (compared by Sharma with 3×10⁻³¹ for steady-state cosmology and 1.293×10⁻³ for air), a time-averaged inter-sharmon distance of ~10⁻⁵ cm comparable to the mean free path of ordinary gases, viscosity 0.57×10⁻²² dyne·s/cm², and rigidity 4.68×10⁻¹². It cannot be pumped out, since sharmons pass between atoms and even between orbital electrons.

The ordinary particles are given compositions to match. The electron is 3.50×10²⁰ negatrinos plus 3.94×10¹⁷ 0-spin sharmons; the proton is 1.75×10²⁰ positive 0-spin "diads" plus 2.619×10²³ sharmons; the neutron has inner and outer regions with 7.06×10¹⁸ diads and stated sharmon populations bound and free. The point of these very large numbers is functional: with that many constituents, a body's composition can fluctuate by emitting and absorbing small cosmino-sharmon units without changing appreciably — which is exactly what the gravitational mechanism requires.

The mechanism of attraction, and of wave propagation

Gravitation is then the continual two-way exchange of 0-spin sharmon aggregates ΔE between a test body and the ambient medium, with the force ΔE/Δx attractive "due to gregarious properties of the 0-spin sharmons in both the test body and sharmon medium". The same mechanism, run with charged cosmino units, is said to produce electrostatic and magnetostatic forces, giving all three static interactions a common cause and a common mediator. The inverse-square law is recovered geometrically, from the distribution of the effect over the surface 4πr²; and because the medium is a gas with locally varying number density, Sharma predicts that G itself is locally variable, being "a physical parameter of the sharmon medium".

Wave propagation is handled by an explicitly contiguous mechanism modelled on sound in a gas but without bulk transport. A gravitational wave quantum passes from one sharmon pair to the next: each pair is briefly raised to the 2-spin state — and while energised is the graviton — then returns to 0-spin as it hands the quantum on. "Only the gravitonic energy comprising 0-spin sharmons is emitted, propagated and absorbed but NOT the energized 2-spin graviton as a whole." The transverse wave velocity is set by the medium's shear elasticity and density and equals c. Sharma also allows a longitudinal gravitational wave — compression and rarefaction, a "cosmic sound" excited by events such as a supernova — whose speed is governed by adiabatic rather than shear elasticity and which therefore, he concludes, "moves faster than light". The same contiguous picture, with 1-spin sharmons, gives the electromagnetic wave with c set by the medium's permittivity and permeability. Since both propagator bosons have finite mass, he modifies the energy relation to E² = (pc)² + (mc²)² + (hν)², from which he writes a Klein–Gordon-like wave equation with an extra frequency term.

Consequences: mass, light bending, and Mach's principle

Because mass and energy are the same stuff, gravitational and inertial mass are not merely equal but identical, and the equivalence principle becomes unnecessary — Sharma notes independently that the fields to which non-inertial frames are equivalent are not fully identical with real gravitational fields, since centrifugal acceleration ω²r grows with r while Gm/r² falls, and since a real field cannot be transformed away. On the rotating disc he denies any contraction of the circumference, so the ratio stays 2π and space remains Euclidean. On Mach's principle he offers a refinement: the total inertial mass is m + mV/c², so in a matter-free universe the second term vanishes but m survives — where Mach's version, he says, leaves nothing at all.

He rejects the Lorentz factor for kinetic mass, proposing instead m′ = m(1 + ½v²/c²) or, on a second reckoning that includes the inertia of the kinetic energy itself, m′′ = m(1 + v²/c²). He tabulates the three competing ratios at v/c = 90%, 99% and 99.5% and — creditably — proposes an experimental test: the Large Hadron Collider could record a force-versus-acceleration trace and see which relation fits.

His light-bending derivation is straightforwardly Newtonian: a photon of finite mass falls under g = GM/R² during a transit time 2R/c, giving θ = 2GM/Rc² radian — Einstein's 1911 value. Sharma observes that this was "later changed to 4 and tested by Eddington" in 1919, and argues that because the field extends well beyond the body's limb the effective influence time exceeds 2R/c, so the true deflection should be larger, "consistent with Einstein's later revision". He extends the same machinery to predict bending of light in strong electric and magnetic fields, with estimated deflections of order 10⁻³⁷ and 10⁻⁹² radian respectively — too small to test, but claimed as unique to his theory. From the Lagrangian L = ½mv² − (mc² + mV) he recovers a metric differing from the Minkowski one only in g₄₄ = 1 + 2V/c².

Finally he predicts that both detection programmes will fail. Estimating the strain a gravity wave would induce in an aluminium bar as of order 10⁻³⁶, against a planned sensitivity of 10⁻¹⁸, he concludes that "neither the Laser Interferometers ... nor the Resonant Mass Detectors would be able to detect the gravity waves", noting that as of February 2008 none had been seen. His proposed substitute is indirect: a supernova's sharmon shower would raise the local density and viscosity of the medium and so increase the redshift of light passing through it, by a formula Z = 6πrηDλ/h — a viscosity-based reddening which, he suggests, would remove the "amazement and horror" caused among astronomers by the Type Ia supernova observations. Gravitational lensing is treated as ordinary refraction by the medium, with a single body acting as a convex lens and a pair of bodies, whose joint field is weakest midway between them, acting as a concave one.

Assessment

The attractive feature of this programme is its refusal to leave anything unexplained by fiat. Sharma will not accept a force without a mediator, a wave without a medium, an equality of masses without an identity of substance, or an equation like E = mc² without something that both sides are made of. That demand for mechanism is a legitimate and old tradition in natural philosophy, and it produces some genuinely well-posed positions: the observation that the fields simulated by non-inertial frames differ from real gravitational fields in their radial dependence is correct and is a fair criticism of loose statements of the equivalence principle; the contiguous propagation scheme, in which the carrier is excited and de-excited without moving, is a coherent way to have a medium without a detectable drag; and the proposal to test the kinetic-mass relation at the LHC by recording force against acceleration is a real, falsifiable suggestion of the kind the paper's more speculative sections lack. The theory is also unusually committed — it names masses, charges, densities and populations rather than hiding behind qualitative talk.

That specificity, however, is where it becomes vulnerable, and the conflicts with measurement are severe. The kinetic-mass proposal m′ = m(1 + ½v²/c²) is not a novel prediction awaiting test: the relativistic factor has been measured directly and repeatedly, from Bucherer's and Kaufmann's early deflection experiments to the daily operation of every synchrotron, where the RF frequency and bending-magnet ramp must track γ = (1 − v²/c²)^−1/2 or the beam is lost. At v/c = 99.5% Sharma's own table puts his figure at about 1.5 against relativity's 10, a discrepancy no accelerator could fail to notice. Second, the paper's light-bending derivation yields the 1911 value 2GM/Rc², which is half the measured deflection; the gap is closed only by the qualitative remark that the "influence time" must exceed the transit time, with no calculation showing that the correction is exactly a factor of two — and it is precisely that factor which the 1919 eclipse and, far more sharply, modern VLBI measurements of radio-source deflection (agreeing with the general-relativistic value to about one part in 10⁴) actually test. Third, the confident prediction that gravitational waves cannot be detected has since been decisively falsified by the LIGO and Virgo observations beginning with GW150914, and the estimate that produced it rests on a step Sharma himself flags as "arbitrarily assuming that the stress propagated within a wave is proportional to the mass density of the medium". Fourth, a superluminal longitudinal mode is asserted from a comparison of two elasticities that are never independently determined. Fifth, the viscosity-based redshift offered as a substitute for cosmic expansion faces the standard objection to all such mechanisms — a viscous medium scattering photons would blur distant images and would not reproduce the (1 + z) time dilation observed in Type Ia supernova light curves, which is the very dataset he invokes.

The deeper methodological difficulty is that the theory's numbers are unanchored. The cosmino mass, charge and diameter, the sharmon population of the proton, the medium's viscosity and rigidity, are all referred to the author's own earlier books rather than derived or measured here, and none is tied to an independent observation. Because the free parameters are numerous and the medium's properties adjustable, the framework can accommodate almost any result — which is why its one genuinely sharp prediction, the kinetic-mass ratio, matters more than the rest of the paper combined, and why its failure is not recoverable by adjustment. The insistence that the sharmon medium is "NOT an assumption or a postulate but a necessary natural deduction" is also not sustained by the argument given: the premises offered (fields need carriers, waves need media, E and m must share a substance) are intuitions about what is intelligible, not deductions, and each has been contested since the nineteenth century. Read as a systematic mechanical ontology in the Le Sage tradition — which Sharma explicitly improves upon by making his corpuscles the constituents of matter rather than merely its bombardiers — the paper is internally consistent and impressively worked out. Read as a replacement for general relativity, it is contradicted at several points by measurements it does not engage.

See also

• Rati Ram Sharma
• Aether
• Push Gravity
• Georges-Louis Le Sage
• Gravity
• General Relativity
• Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational Lensing
• Equivalence Principle
• Mach's Principle
• Inertia
• Casimir Effect
• Zero Point Energy
• Dayton C Miller
• Tired Light